Bubba Sparxxx: Dark Days, Bright Nights : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

A new segment of America is stepping up to the national microphone that is hip-hop. We've heard from poor urban whites (Eminem) and the Black South (OutKast, Master P., etc.). Now welcome Bubba Sparxxx, representing for the white country boys with his major-label debut, Dark Days, Bright Nights. He gets drunk on Jim Beam, he calls his girls "Bettys" and his turds "grumpys," and he can flow. This is no clown act or novelty record. Bubba takes his twangy tone and rides Timbaland's hot beats like a pro, flowing right and changing speeds. That's not an easy task given the weird sounds and tempos in a normal Timbaland track - and these are some of Tim's more outer-limit beats. Dark Days is littered with aggressively futuristic Space Age grooves and scrunch-up-your-face nasty funk ("Twerk a Little") and inflected with bhangra sounds ("Ugly" and "Bubba Talk"). But Bubba's up to the challenge of Tim, and he gives you what every great hip-hop artist does: a voyeuristic trip into his world.

Athens, Georgia, ain't as sexy as Jay-Z's Marcy Projects or Snoop Dogg's LBC, but Bubba paints his world with lucid style. He calls it the New South, and although Bubba may look like a part of the old South - the kind of rural Southern white that some black people would cross the street to avoid - his head is on straight when it comes to race. He acknowledges, then sets aside, racial differences on "All the Same," and on the title track he says, "I probably won't even fault ya if you dismiss me as the demon/Because it's true/I am not you/My skin's the tone of pissy semen/But if we fight this evening I assure you, we'll both be red/And it'll take your whole slum and all they guns to leave me dead/Plus all that blood we shed won't do nothin' but serve they purpose/So let's unite these dark days and bright nights then see who's nervous." The whitening of hip-hop continues. But as long as everybody takes the music this seriously and comes with as much quality as Bubba does, they are welcome.

TOURE
(RS 882 - November 22, 2001)